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en-usTechdirt. Stories filed under "pictures"https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/td-88x31.gifhttps://www.techdirt.com/Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:18:15 PDTWhat's Wrong With This Picture?Glyn Moodyhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130320/09514322389/whats-wrong-with-this-picture.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130320/09514322389/whats-wrong-with-this-picture.shtml
As you may have heard, there's been an election in Rome recently. These kind of events tend to bring out the crowds, and NBC had the clever idea of finding a couple of pictures showing roughly the same view, but eight years apart. They look very similar, except for one rather striking detail: in the first, from 2005, there are a few mobile phones visible; in the second, taken recently, tiny screens are visible everywhere in the crowd -- it seems as if practically everyone is using their phone to take a picture.

An article in the Huffington Post rightly points out that the two pictures aren't strictly comparable: the older photo was taken shortly after the death of Pope John Paul II, when his body had been carried across St Peter's Square. That contrasts with the rather more joyous event of the new Pope Francis speaking to the public for the first time after his election.

But the same article also notes that other pictures taken at the time of the election of Pope Benedict XVI a few weeks after the death of his predecessor show a similar scarcity of people holding up their phones to take pictures. And a moment's reflection will confirm that nowadays there is an almost reflexive urge to use our smartphones with their high-quality cameras to capture anything of note that is going on around us, in a way that wasn't the case when cameras were separate things (to say nothing of when some kind of physical film had to be loaded, emptied and developed in order to use them.) The huge numbers of pictures on Facebook alone -- 220 billion as of October last year, rising by 300 million each day -- also bears witness to that.

This raises many interesting questions, for example to do with how people nowadays relate to their memories, and what the existence of so many photos means for privacy and surveillance. But here I want to consider one other aspect.

Judging by the Facebook numbers quoted above, there are now probably trillions of digital photos in existence, with billions more being created each day. It goes without saying that this wealth of fixed (and moving) images is unprecedented in the history of mankind. That also means the things that could be done with those images are also unprecedented, because new scales bring new possibilities. For example, by combining millions of pictures taken by thousands of people of the same location at different moments it would be possible to create interesting four-dimensional digital artifacts -- navigable 3D worlds that change with time.

Except, of course, that you can't, thanks to the way that copyright is automatically attached to creations once they are fixed -- for example, by storing a digital photo. To use all those images for this kind of reconstruction would require every single one of them to be licensed under a suitable Creative Commons license that allowed them to be re-used. Even the simplest of them -- CC-BY -- would be hard to comply with, since attribution would need to be available for every photo that made even the smallest contribution to the different composite images for each moment of time. Ideally, billions of images would be placed in the public domain, allowing any kind of use, but that's surprisingly hard to achieve, because of the prevailing presumption that copyright should apply to everything, for as long as possible. Certainly, it's not something we can reasonably hope huge numbers of people might do routinely.

This inability to tap into the incredible collective wealth of a trillion digital images stored around the world imbues that recent picture of thousands of people holding up their mobile phones in Rome with a certain melancholy. The blurred screens receding into the distance become a symbol of all that we cannot see thanks to copyright laws whose original focus on protecting small numbers of hard-to-produce works from copying is no longer appropriate.

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]]>change-of-focushttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130320/09514322389Wed, 7 Nov 2012 14:50:00 PSTDid Some Web Designer Troll Rick Santorum? 4chan's Moot Pictured On Santorum's WebsiteMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121107/11151420962/did-some-web-designer-troll-rick-santorum-4chans-moot-pictured-santorums-website.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121107/11151420962/did-some-web-designer-troll-rick-santorum-4chans-moot-pictured-santorums-website.shtmlReddit, former Presidential candidate Rick Santorum -- perhaps most well known among internet kids for the Google bombing of his name to associate it with... something unpleasant -- apparently has a picture of Chris Poole, better known as moot, the creator of the web's most popular home for internet trolls, 4chan (and yes, there's much more at 4chan, but... ).

The folks over at Betabeat investigated and confirmed that a web design firm built the site, though it's unclear if moot's picture was the work of a sneaky, trolling web designer... or just an attempt to find "regular-looking" people to populate Santorum's site.

Patriot Voices used the startup Nation Builder, a web tool kit for community organizers, as a platform for the site. A representative for Nation Builder told Betabeat that the site was designed by an outside designer at the Pittsburgh-based political consulting and advertising firm Brabender Cox.

Dubbed “the premier Republican spin doctors,” Brabender Cox has a longstanding history of working to promote Republican candidates. In addition to doing work for Mr. Santorum, they’ve also created viral videos and advertising content for politicians like Republican Senator Tom Coburn and Republican Mayor of Indiana Greg Ballard.

Betabeat reached out to the organization but hasn't heard back yet.

Oh, and if you're wondering, it seems likely that the use of the work is copyright infringement. It was pulled from Poole's Wikipedia page, and the image is Creative Commons licensed, but part of that license is that attribution is required. There doesn't seem to be any such attribution. Oops.

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]]>hilarioushttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20121107/11151420962Mon, 17 Sep 2012 11:28:25 PDTUniversity Requires Students To Pay $180 For 'Art History' Text That Has No Photos Due To Copyright ProblemsMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120917/01060120399/university-requires-students-to-pay-180-art-history-text-that-has-no-photos-due-to-copyright-problems.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120917/01060120399/university-requires-students-to-pay-180-art-history-text-that-has-no-photos-due-to-copyright-problems.shtmlart textbook has no images because they couldn't clear the copyrights:

This year, however, the textbook for Global VISUAL and Material Culture has no pictures. Students have been told that the publisher couldn’t get the copyright permissions settled in time for the print run, so students will have to read the book, and see the pictures online by following along on their computer.

There is no discount on the $180 price for an ART textbook that has NO PICTURES. Devoid of pictures. Bereft of art. If I am going to have to pay $180 for an art history book that is of no resale value to next year’s students, it had damn well better be an excellent visual reference with hard cover and full colour plates, to keep around for years, festooning my coffee table and that of my heirs.

Students in the class have put up a petition to protest what they quite correctly call a "sham." It's even more bizarre given that recent court rulings in Canada would suggest that the images in question would be given pretty broad "fair dealing" protections for the purpose of education. But, just the threat of copyright claims, apparently, are creating an absolutely ridiculous situation.